


The Esoteric Fethry Duck

by MadameBizarre, muirchiara



Category: Disney Duck Universe, Disney Ducks (Comics)
Genre: Gen, LGBT characters, Near Death Experiences, Non-Linear Narrative, Search for Meaning, Self-Discovery, a splash of angst, general Fortean strangeness
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-03
Updated: 2018-08-07
Packaged: 2019-06-20 23:37:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15544737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MadameBizarre/pseuds/MadameBizarre, https://archiveofourown.org/users/muirchiara/pseuds/muirchiara
Summary: A near-death experience as a young child drastically changes the course of Fethry Duck's life, leading him to where he is now, and wherever it is he's headed.





	1. An Inciting Incident of Sorts

**Author's Note:**

> I started this back in December of 2017, stopped working on it in January, and then came back to it at the end of July because I started getting hype about Fethry being Confirmed for DuckTales. Originally, it was sort of an idea of how I thought he could be in DT17, but then it sort of got away from that. 
> 
> I'll be honest, I'm not really sure where I'm going with this. But I can say that you're in for a long, strange trip. So turn on, tune in, and drop out (of whatever you were doing, I guess).
> 
> \--Muir

As a young child, Fethry Duck fell from a tree.

It knocked the wind out of him. It knocked the  _ soul _ out of him, clearly, because instead of on the ground, looking up at the sky, he was up in the air, looking down at himself, and somehow still on the ground at the same time. His cousins concerned cries of “Fethry!” echoed in his ears--did he still have ears?--as he drifted away. That is, until something, or someone, caught him.

He didn’t recognize it at first. He had no way of knowing, he never knew her; but this wasn’t the earthly plane he normally lived on. He felt her warm embrace and understood.

A thought that was not his own entered his mind:  _ You aren’t meant to be here yet _ .

_ I like it here _ , he replied.  _ I wanna stay _ . All around him, Fethry could feel them: everyone who had ever come before him, and everyone who would come after; every person who ever loved him and every person who ever  _ would _ love him. It was a feeling he would later recognize as  _ unconditional love _ ; it comforted him.

_ I know you do _ , she said.  _ And you can, if you truly want to… But consider what will happen to them. _ Somehow, even lacking fingers, she pointed to his cousins, and Grandma, gathered around him as an ambulance neared.

In his mind’s eye, Fethry saw a future without him. His father, Eider, having lost two of the people he loved the most, would become a ghost of himself. Going through the same motions over and over, with no real thought behind them. His brother, Whitewater, a loner to begin with, would withdraw even farther, his promise broken. Eventually he would find himself a hermit in the far north of Canada, far, far away from his family, and from the past.

The other children, the ones who were there that day, would never truly recover. They would always remember seeing him fall (even if they actually had their back turned the moment it happened); they would remember the sickening  _ crack! _ of his head against the tree’s roots (memory would twist it to be louder, more grotesque, than it truly was). They would remember the quiver in Grandma’s voice as she tried to explain to them that Baby Fethry was not coming back.

Della would neglect her twin. Not intentionally, but she would pull away, getting in with a bad crowd and making reckless decisions. Even more reckless than she would otherwise. And Donald, poor Donald, would never stop blaming himself, even though there was nothing he could have done, there was no reason to think he was at fault, but he would, nonetheless. He would grow up too soon, working odd jobs here and there, but going nowhere, with dreams of the sea. Della, on the other hand, would never grow up. She would go out in a blaze of self-destruction.

Gladstone, too, would secretly blame himself. Surely his luck could have prevented this somehow, but didn’t, and that was his fault. Why else would this have happened, if not because he simply didn’t love his cousin enough? His luck could do nothing to comfort him. His life would be an endless distraction from guilt, from memory.

Grandma would try her darndest to keep everyone together, handing out chores to keep them busy, enticing everyone to get together with home-cooked meals, always there with a pie or cookies or muffins and a shoulder to cry on. She would give their shoulder a squeeze and ask them to wake up Gus and remind him of what he was supposed to be doing.

And Gus Goose, well, to be fair, he wouldn’t change much at all.

But the effect of Fethry’s absence would ripple through the family, a strange, reclusive lot.

_ Do you see? Do you understand, Fethry? _ she asked. He found himself back in the present, whatever “present” might mean, and as young as he was, he knew he couldn’t let that happen to his family.

_ I do, I do _ , he said, even as he clung ever tighter to her.  _ I wanna go back _ .

_ That’s my good boy _ , she said, and gently laid him down.

Fethry’s eyes fluttered open, and he found he was no longer where he left off.

“Grandma?” he said, his own voice sounding unfamiliar to him. Grandma Duck, seated beside him, gripped his hand and cradled his cheek as he turned his head to look at her.

“Oh, Fethry!” she cried. “You gave us such a fright!” Along with other things he wasn’t quite lucid enough to remember. He still felt his mother’s embrace around him.

Fethry could not say for certain where it was he went in the timeless span he was out of his body. All he knew was that he had a purpose in life, a message, something that would deliver all of mankind into the future. He had been given the key to spiritual evolution.

The trouble was, he wasn’t sure exactly what that key was.

He knew it was there, somewhere, just outside his grasp. He knew he  _ would _ figure it out, eventually; he would have to just keep taking shots in the dark until he found something.

In any case, the experience changed Fethry, and others noticed.


	2. Sometime Before

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fethry, as he was.

“Cuh--Cous'n Donow,” Fethry whispered, meekly shaking his shoulder. “Donow?” He patted him with slightly more force. Donald grunted.

“What?” he grumbled, not even looking back at him.

“I gotta go potty,” Fethry said. Donald, eight years old to Fethry’s three, gave a world-weary sigh (as much at Fethry’s word choice as being woken up in the middle of the night), and slid out of bed, taking him by the hand as he did so. Fethry huddled close, thumb in his mouth, as they made their way down the dark hallway to the bathroom.

The only light in the hall came from the moon through the window; Grandma had long since retired to bed and turned the hall light off.

“I don’t know why you always gotta wake  _ me _ up,” Donald grumbled, more to himself than to Fethry. He flicked the bathroom light on, shoved Fethry in, and shut the door behind him. “Can’t even wake his own brother, only cousin Donald.”

After a few minutes, there came a timid knock on the other side of the door. “Donow?” Donald knew what he was about to ask him and was already moving to open the door, since Fethry was too small to reach the knob.

“Fush?” Fethry asked, even as Donald made his way to the toilet to flush it for him.

“Did you wash your hands?” Donald asked. Fethry wrung his hands and stared silently back at him. “Wash your hands!” Not bothering to move Fethry’s step-stool from one side of the bathroom to another, he grabbed Fethry around the middle and lifted him up to the sink. After Fethry washed and dried his hands, Donald simply shifted him in his arms and carried him back to their room.

“Thank’ou, Donow,” Fethry mumbled sleepily against his shoulder.

“Yeah, yeah,” Donald grumbled back.


	3. He got it for him special

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fethry has a gift for Donald, who is skeptical.

Fethry would not--perhaps could not--simply hand over an object. He would take a person by the hand, and place whatever he intended to give into their palm, clasping his hands around theirs. (And it usually was something palm-sized.)

“What is this?” Donald asked, looking down at the crystal in his hand, and asking the wrong question, as he already knew it was a crystal.

“It’s blue quartz,” Fethry replied, apparently understanding what Donald meant nonetheless. “It’s a good stone for peace and tranquility, and gives a boost to creativity and expression. I thought it would be a good one for you.” Donald inhaled as if to speak, but Fethry continued.

“I tend to keep a smoky quartz on me because I’m always misplacing things,” he retrieved from his hat a grey, six-sided crystal, naturally formed into a point. “It looks pretty plain, but it’s the premiere stone for grounding, y’know, dissipating emotional and environmental negativity. It’s also--”

“How,” Donald cut him off, not really in a questioning way.

Fethry blinked. “How?”

“How does a rock do all that?”

Deep within his psyche, Fethry knew how it all worked: the connection of stones, pieces of the earth, to energy, how he and the crystal were a part of one another, how their energies fed into each other, how he and the crystal were both part of something larger, that every part of him was connected to every person, every animal, every natural formation, and that this was true of everyone and everything on earth, Donald included.

But how on earth could he put that to words?

“Just trust me on this, Donald,” he said.

“...If you say so,” Donald said, pocketing the stone. It was unpolished, and the cool, rough texture was nice on his hand (if he was to be honest).

Later on, perhaps a few months, Fethry would see the stone once again on the desk in Donald’s computer room. With the window open, the sun hit the blue quartz just right and radiated it’s color across the slim stack of papers laying beside the keyboard.

“Did it work?” Fethry asked, standing in the doorway.

“Did what work?” Donald replied, turning in his computer chair.

“The quartz!”

And regardless whether Donald was telling the truth, or merely protecting his cousin’s feelings, he answered with a smile.

“Yeah, it has. Thanks, Fethry.”


End file.
